Have you tested LinkedIn Ads yet?

Like AdWords, Bing or Facebook, LinkedIn advertising has its idiosyncrasies. It’s quite different from SEM or display buying. It’s a unique ad buying and ad management experience that deserves a handbook of its own. In this post, I’ll lay down the basics, explain how it works, and share with you some tricks and best practices to get the most from your LinkedIn CPC investment.

Who Should Advertise On LinkedIn?

Before you decide whether this is truly a channel worth testing for your business, you should ask yourself:

“What affinity is a professional, in a day-job mindset, likely to have for my product, service or offer?”

Business-to-business marketing is usually a snug fit here. If you sell something that benefits business owners or working professionals and you can, in one short sentence, clearly delineate why, the answer is probably yes.

People are on this site to better their careers, find a new job, network, connect with business contacts, and to get a few minutes of mindless get-away-from-work time. Your offer should speak to someone in that head space.

If you make educational games for children, maybe LinkedIn Ads aren’t your hottest new marketing channel.

Who Sees LinkedIn Ads?

Nearly everyone surfing LinkedIn and some of their partner sites. The partner sites, called the LinkedIn Audience Network, are mostly high-end media sites, some of which are also part of the Doubleclick exchange and the ad network Collective Media. Some of their partners are:

• New York Times
• BusinessWeek
• CNBC

People in your network and outside of it. Here’s where they show up and what they look like:

Who Can I Target?

You can get pretty smart about targeting your customer. Company size, title, industry and geographic targeting are available.

Perhaps you’re marketing a recruiting firm focused on executive search for tech companies in Silicon Valley. Your targeting profile might look like this:

• VPs of Human Resources
• Companies of 501+ employees
• High Tech & Semiconductor industries
• In and around the San Francisco Bay Area

Anatomy Of The LinkedIn Ad

LinkedIn Ads are a hair different than your standard AdWords ad, because they have a photo.

Hot tip: According to LinkedIn’s own optimization team, choosing a photo of a woman typically drives the best clickthrough rates. Only use your business logo if you’re trying to build brand awareness. Don’t have too much going on in your photo — remember, it’s a small thumbnail and you have a lighting-quick opportunity to draw the eye to your ad before, poof, it’s gone.

1. Headline. It’s got to be short, so use something punchy. Using the title of the people you’re targeting can be very effective.
2. Ad copy. You know how this works!
3. Destination URL. You want a landing page tailored for LinkedIn members, if necessary.  Don’t just take visitors to your homepage. Think about why people spend time on LinkedIn and dream up something relevant to the LinkedIn audience.
4. Photo. Like I said: pick something that draws the eye. Photos of people are better.

How Much Do LinkedIn Ads Cost?

As with any contextual CPC ads, it depends on your targeting criteria and your competition, but we’ve seen CPCs start at around $2 and run up to $4 or $5 per click, with the higher end typically coming into play when your clickthrough rates aren’t fantastic.

Clickthrough rates vary. LinkedIn pegs a good clickthrough rate at 0.025%, but you can do better with laser-targeted ads featuring compelling copy and a vibrant photo.

A good rule of thumb is to shoot for a number that would make a pleasant blood alcohol content after a good night out: if you can achieve better than .08% to 0.10% you’re in very good shape.

Hot tip: Switch up your ads often, at least once a month. New ads get a boost in terms of impressions and have a chance of scoring a higher CTR than your previous ads. Don’t run more than 2 ads at a time. Test early and test often.

How Should I Capture The Leads?

You have two ways to collect leads from LinkedIn Ads, and I recommend you use both simultaneously.

The first is obvious: your landing page. Consider giving away something for free — like great content relevant to your audience — or running some kind of promotion. People jump at free stuff, and their engaging with your offer puts them into your lead nurture funnel and opens the door to a relationship.

You can try to run ads selling your product directly, but our experience with Clever Zebo clients has been that you’ll see low interest that way unless you’re really selling something awesome and relevant.

So what’s the second way? It’s a feature LinkedIn cleverly calls “lead collection” and it looks like this:

When someone requests to contact you about your ad, you’ll get an email and have a chance to reach out immediately — and conveniently for the user, they never have to divert their browsing experience to get in touch with you.

The key shortcoming of this feature, at the time of writing, is that you can’t have email alerts about collected leads go to more than one recipient, so choose wisely.

Tracking Your Ads

At the time of writing, LinkedIn didn’t yet offer conversion tracking, so, to state the obvious, you need to track conversions specific to LinkedIn Ads using your analytics solution.

Why should you track your ads? The biggest reason: so you can make an educated decision about whether the channel is ROI-positive for your business, and so you have clear visibility into which optimizations you choose to make will ultimately impact your bottom line (not just your traffic).

Here’s what you want to look for in Google Analytics to ensure you can track conversions from these ads:

1. Set up Goals.

Click on Settings | Profiles | Goals, and add a goal in the screen below.

You’ll likely want a “URL destination” goal, meaning that the goal will be triggered when your user hits a specific page after converting. Usually this is a “thank you” page or an order confirmation page.

You don’t need your domain name in the URL. If your confirm page URL were www.yoursite.com/thank-you, it can simply look like this: /thank-you.

2. Look at your Traffic Sources and cross-reference against the goal(s).

You can also create unique URLs for each ad you’re running, in order to get ad-level conversion data. Why do this? Let’s say you’re trying to determine whether you should explicitly show pricing in your ad copy. You might find that fewer people click the ad, deterred by the dollar signs — but the only way to learn that, for example, those who do click the ad with pricing are converting better and spending more time on the site, is to set up tracking at the ad level.

You can add the appropriate ‘utm’ parameters to make sure Google Analytics picks up the data.

A sample ad URL might be: www.yoursite.com/linkedin-landing-pg?utm_source=ppc&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=ad-number-1

You should also check analytics for engagement metrics (time on site, pageviews, bounce rate, etc.) to understand how long LinkedIn ad visitors are staying on your site. If you’re consistently seeing a time on site of under 5 seconds, your offer isn’t compelling, your landing page needs work, or your ad copy is a little “too attractive” for the effort required to convert.

Look at the pages these users are visiting to get a sense for the quality of the visits. Are they reading up on your company at all, or are they just hitting the landing page and bouncing?

Just like any paid media channel, what happens on the other end of the click matters most. Study your conversion funnel and make sure it contains none of the all-too-common user experience pitfalls that tend to annoy prospects.

Hot tip: If you’re a marketer or business owner on a shoestring budget, find a way to nab one of those $50 LinkedIn Ads gift cards. Some online marketing agencies will hook you up with them, or you can try contacting the LinkedIn team for one.

Ultimately, LinkedIn Ads can be an expensive promotion channel in terms of CPCs, aimed at an elite audience; you have to be crafty to extract ROI from it, but it’s worth testing. Needless to say, paid advertising is just one way to get leads via LinkedIn; you can also get strategic about using LinkedIn groups to source leads.

In the second part of this series, we’ll explore more advanced techniques and load you up with juicy nuggets and tricks to derive maximum ROI. Now go test up a storm!

About the Author: Igor Belogolovsky is Cofounder of Clever Zebo, a group of online marketing strategy experts specializing in SEM, SEO and conversion funnel optimization. He also happens to like craft beer and snowboarding.

Those days are ending, if they aren’t already completely over. Today, an advertiser with great marketing but a terrible product or customer service may be outright banned from most advertising channels, and will have a hard time profiting from the remaining few that allow him access. Mistreat your customers and you can get banned from Google AdWords, eBay, Amazon, and comparison shopping engines, not to mention getting slaughtered by bad reviews on Yelp and massively viral outrage via social media.

Introducing A New Social Component: Google Plus

Recently Google announced an innovation that could be the most significant change yet – the integration of Google Plus “+1’s” into Google AdWords. This new feature allows advertisers to use social proof to enhance their advertisements. To highlight the power of this feature, ask yourself this:

If you have rabid fans of your product or service, why not leverage these advocates in your Adwords advertising?

The concept here is a direct homage (or, um, some would say, rip off) of “social actions” in Facebook PPC. Google Plus integration, which Google calls “social extensions”, works the same way. If your friends +1 a company, you might see their mugshots below that company’s AdWords ads:

Imagine doing a search for “mortgage rates” and seeing pictures of your friends next to only one of the eight to ten ads Google serves up – the combination of social proof and herd mentality are incredibly strong psychological factors to resist. Over time, imagine repeating that search and seeing pictures of your friends next to all of the ads except for one. Is there any doubt that you would avoid the lone outlier like the plague?

Search is a “bottom of the funnel” channel, Facebook is “top of the funnel.” When a consumer conducts a search on Google, he is very close to making a purchase decision. As such, social proof – or lack thereof – on search results pages is potentially way more important to advertisers than social proof on Facebook, simply because this social proof could very likely be the difference between an immediate sale or lost business to a competitor.

How to Connect Your Google+ Page to Your AdWords Account

To integrate Google+ into your AdWords account, start by clicking the “Campaigns” tab in your AdWords account. To the very right of all the standard tabs at the top of the tab (Campaigns, Ad Groups, Settings, etc.) you’ll see a little button with a down arrow on it. Click this button and an additional list of tab options will appear. Select the one called “Ad Extensions”:

You should then be automatically taken to the “Ad Extensions” tab. Once again, you need to find the hidden option by click on the drop-down list entitled “View: Location Extensions.” Scroll down until you see “Social Extensions” and click that.

You are now ready to link one or more of your AdWords Campaigns with your Google+ account. To start, just click the “New Extension” button:

The next screen prompts you to choose the Campaign you want to associate with Google+. Generally speaking, there’s no disadvantage to associating all of your campaigns with Google+, but if you want to start conservatively (which is always a good idea), start by testing one or two campaigns that will get you enough clicks to determine the effectiveness of social extensions. Make sure to enter the URL of your Google+ page here as well!

And voila, you now have a Google+ page linked to your AdWords account via a “social extension”! Now that you are connected, you need to start analyzing the actual performance of the social extension. It’s important to understand that Google determines the rank of ads on search result pages (SERPs) based on two primary factors: the maximum cost per click you are willing to pay (Max CPC) and your ad’s click through rate (CTR). When you change your ad text – in this case, by adding social extensions – you are hoping that this change leads to an increase in clicks from quality users. The higher the CTR, the lower the CPC you have to pay to get to the top of the results.

Keep in mind that your goal is to get quality users, not just any users. So if your social extensions resulted in thousands of people clicking on your ads but no one actually buying anything from you, you would win the battle but lose the war (more specifically, you would be making money for Google but not for your business). For this reason, in addition to evaluating the impact social extensions have on CTR, it’s also worth measuring the impact they have on your conversion rate (CR). At PPC Associates, we do this by evaluating what we call “Conversions Per Thousand Impressions” (CPI). To calculate this metric, simply multiple your CTR times your CR. If social extensions in your ad text gives you a higher CPI, you should see a decrease in CPC and an increase in conversion rates – a win-win!

As noted, the theory behind social extensions and the convergence of Google+ and AdWords is that recommendations from friends (social proof) increases both clicks and conversion rate. Theories, however, always need to be tested. If you find that social extensions are performing poorly as compared to other extensions in a given campaign, you may need to eliminate them from that campaign.

What This Means for the Future

So what can you do to position your company in a future where Google+ matters? For starters, get a Google+ account for your business and start building relationships with your customers through Google+. Growing your base of +1’s will positively influence both organic and paid results on Google (note: for organic results, +1’s will influence someone’s personalized search results, I am not suggesting that +1’s will necessarily improve a company’s Page Rank).

In addition to simply having a Google+ account, marketers need to start become internal champions for outstanding customer service and awesome products. It is no longer enough to just do a great job of driving traffic or sales and wash your hands of responsibility for the actual customer experience. Online marketers who disregard customer satisfaction will be put out of business by these very customers, either indirectly through social proof mechanisms like Google+ or Yelp, or directly through outright bans on major marketing channels like eBay, Amazon, and AdWords.

A famous cartoon in the New Yorker once noted “on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” Today, at least concerning online advertisers, that phrase rings hollow. It’s fairly easy for potential customers to determine whether or not your company is a “dog”, in the pejorative sense.

Integrating social proof like Google+ into AdWords makes it even easier for customers to make this judgment. AdWords advertisers will live and die not by their crafty ad text, advanced bidding algorithms, or beautiful conversion funnels, but simply by delivering great products with great service to consumers.

About the Author: David Rodnitzky is CEO of PPC Associates, an SEM agency in Silicon Valley. Follow him on Twitter @rodnitzky or contact him at david@ppcassociates.com.

But when you dig a bit deeper and start to analyze the impact of those increased pageviews, you probably notice that your revenue hasn’t really gone up at all.

So what’s the point of measuring and improving metrics like pageviews when they don’t even impact your bottom line? You see, those metrics are called vanity metrics, because they simply give you a brief, warm-and-fuzzy feeling. However, the sobering reality is that vanity metrics aren’t important to your business.

Instead of wasting your time tracking vanity metrics like pageviews, consider tracking the following 5 customer metrics:

Metric #1: Lifetime Value

Do you know the lifetime value of your customers? If you don’t, then how can you possibly maximize your revenue and profit?

For example, Amazon spends millions of dollars on advertisements each month and in many cases they lose money the first time someone clicks through on an advertisement and buys from them. Simple logic would have us think that Amazon should stop advertising, right?

That’s actually wrong because Amazon knows that if you buy something from them once, you will continue to buy from them over the next 5 or 10 years. Amazon is willing to lose money on you during year one because they know they’ll make it up over the next few years.

Tracking your customer lifetime value helps you make better marketing decisions. If you know a customer is worth $100 a year and an average customer stays on board for 3 years ($300 in total revenue), then you might be willing to pay upwards of $100 to acquire that customer. Heck, you could even pay over $200 to acquire a customer in that scenario assuming your profit margins are high enough. They key here is: having the knowledge of your customer lifetime value allows you to make better marketing decisions.

By tracking the customer lifecycle and being able to understand your lifetime value, you’ll actually be able to maximize your revenue and profits the right way which will enable you to grow your business faster.

Metric #2: Events

Don’t you love seeing how many purchases are coming through your website? Tracking that is great, but are you also tracking what people do before they make their purchase?

The reason you need to track specific actions (events) on your website is so that you can figure out what steps people need to take before they purchase. Knowing this enables you to get more people to take those same actions.

Example: KISSinsights

A little background information: As you may know, our main product KISSmetrics, is a customer analytics tool. We also provide a website survey tool called KISSinsights.

With KISSinsights we offer a basic free survey tool as well as a couple of premium subscription plans. We know that before people upgrade into a premium account, not only do they create a survey, collect some responses and view the responses, but they also go through this 3 times on average.

By tracking these events that are specific to our business, we were able to learn what exact activity led to people purchasing our premium plans. We were able to take action on this by encouraging people to create more surveys, get more responses and view the results in a shorter amount of time. This has led to a substantial increase in revenue for us.

Metric #3: Cohorts

According to Wikipedia, a cohort is:

In statistics and demography, a cohort is a group of subjects who have shared a particular time together during a particular time span (e.g., people born in Europe between 1918 and 1939; survivors of an aircrash; truck drivers who smoked between age 30 and 40). Cohorts may be tracked over extended periods in a cohort study. The cohort can be modified by censoring, i.e. excluding certain individuals from statistical calculations relating to time periods (e.g. after death) when their data would contaminate the conclusions.

The term cohort can also be used where membership of a group is defined by some factor other than a time-based one: for example, where a study covers workers in many buildings, a cohort might consist of the people who work in a given building.

The purpose of a cohort report is to help you understand if you are actually improving your metrics over time. This is accomplished by viewing your metrics based on time-based cohorts of users.

For example, with KISSinsights we regularly get free signups each day and we also get a some of those free users to upgrade into paid accounts each day. So if you look a graph that plots out the total number of free and paid users we have, things APPEAR really good.

But when we ran a cohort report we noticed something was off. Although we were constantly getting new free signups each day, all of our paid signups were coming from people who signed up before August, 2011. Very few, if any of the people who signed up after August were upgrading. When we dug deeper, we realized that in August we changed the way new users were prompted to upgrade into premium accounts.

Since we were still seeing a increasing number of upgrades each day, we wouldn’t have realized that we had a problem if we didn’t do a cohort analysis. The cohort analysis showed us that people who signed up after August had a lower conversion rate to paid plans than people who signed up before August. This would have eventually resulted in a big drop in revenue.

With a cohort report you can measure your business by viewing people who signed up during different periods of time and comparing their performance based on your key metrics. Remember, just because your graphs are going up and to the right, doesn’t mean your business is doing well.

Metric #4: Marketing Attribution

Do you know how many times someone comes back to your site before they make a purchase? In an ideal world people will buy from you the first time they land on your website, but that isn’t always the case.

Understanding marketing attribution is important if you are buying advertising. Whether it is pay-per-click ads, banner ads, or ads on Facebook, knowing the first entry point, second, third, etc. is useful because then you can figure out what leads someone to purchase.

For example, I recently worked with a remote control car company that spends thousands of dollars on pay-per-click ads each day. At first they thought their campaigns weren’t converting because they just looked at the last entry source that caused a conversion. When they started to look at marketing attribution they realized that people come back on average 2.83 times before they purchased and most of their buyers first found their website through pay-per-click.  Once they found this out they realized that their pay-per-click campaigns where actually highly profitable… it just took 32 days on average before the campaigns reached profitability.

Metric #5: People

Do you know which of your customers are happy and which ones aren’t? And even if you know that data you are probably thinking why it’s important, right?

Customers that are happy are more likely to keep on paying you and recommend your product or service to others.

Customers who are unhappy are more likely to complain and tell other people about the bad experience they had with your company.

By tracking people, not only can you figure out how to delight your customers, you can also maximize your revenue.

For example, if you take the KISSinsights event tracking example from above you can find out which of your customers haven’t taken the actions that lead to upgrades and then you can re-engage with them by sending them an email to encourage them to take those actions.

If you aren’t tracking people you won’t be able to figure out how to maximize your revenue. You can’t engage with them if you aren’t able to tie the actions they take or don’t take with their actual names and email addresses.

Conclusion

Vanity metrics may seem like the right metrics to track at first, especially since most analytics tools focus on them, but they won’t help you improve your business. Why would you want to waste your time tracking or even improving metrics that won’t help you increase your revenue or profit?

Of course your wouldn’t! Stop wasting time and start getting actionable metrics today.

Get started by signing up for a free 30-day trial of KISSmetrics…

As the world changes and as new technology emerges, the phrase seems to have taken on new meaning. Whether you have a retail location or not, you need to pay attention to the location of the consumer, and tailor your marketing message accordingly. This infographic briefly explores geo-marketing, why it matters, and how it can be used to grow your business. Special thanks to @emarketer, @visionwiz, @BFMweb, @mint_social, @streetfightmag, and @iab.

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Facts and Stats to Tweet:

• 63% of smartphone users frequently use apps that require them to give their location (2010). »tweet«
• Local online advertising expected to grow 255% to $35b by 2014 (U.S.) »tweet«
• 90% of U.S. marketing agencies had clients requesting geographically targeted online ad campaigns (2011). »tweet«
• 65% of companies are focusing on geographical context for their mobile marketing tactics (2011). »tweet«
• 50% of the visitors to Google Maps only do business with the top 3 results. »tweet«
• 60% of advertising professionals say that geo-targeted ads deliver a stronger ROI than other buys (2011). »tweet«
• A test conducted by one company suggested that hyper-local CTR was 30% higher than CTR for traditional search engine marketing (SEM). »tweet«

Paid Media Is Important

Its ability to deliver and scale a brand’s message to the right people at the right time is unmatched by any other form of advertising. While AdWords, Facebook Ads, and banner ad campaigns can deliver a lot of immediate and long-term value to a brand, the channel can become very costly as well – eating away at the budgets of beginner and experienced marketers alike. However, implementing a few quick tweaks and tactics to your overall paid media strategy can help you drive down your costs and earn more value from your media buying initiatives.

To get the most out of your efforts, understand and internally define these three factors of your paid media:

1. Targeting – Who should see the ads?
2. Messaging – What should the ads say?
3. Goals – What needs to be achieved?

Once these three factors have been defined based on your efforts, you can add to and tweak your current campaigns’ targeting and messaging to help you reach your defined goals. Below are five targeting, messaging, and goal defining tactics that can help you, the online marketer, find new successes with paid media. Let’s jump in!

1. Target Keywords Of Your Industry’s Biggest Events

Attending industry tradeshows and events is crucial for many businesses. It provides a more personable way for businesses to connect with prospects, clients, and audiences that can’t be done through email or social media channels. But people can only have so much networking volume in person. Using Adwords, brands can reach a large volume of a tradeshow’s audience at a relatively low cost by targeting their industry’s biggest events.

Example:

Greenbuild is perhaps the world’s largest and most popular expo dedicated to green building. Thousands of deals can get started during its expo. So wouldn’t it make sense for relevant companies to build interest around the event’s keyword? Not yet, apparently:

The volume of search queries around Greenbuild will only increase as the event gets closer. At a very low competition and a high volume of searches, it makes sense for any green construction firm to advertise on this keyword.

Below you’ll see that Marin Software took the initiative with the ad:tech New York event, perhaps the biggest online advertising and marketing event:

2. Iterate Creative Copy To Promote Your Brand’s Earned Media Wins

If you were researching a product like KISSmetrics, would you click on an ad like this?

I definitely would.

Whether a product is earning positive media on Twitter, a small blog, or Mashable, any social proof can help move a brand’s audience from thinking about converting to actually converting. Unfortunately, most of your earned media won’t have the reach or volume to be able to influence all of the people who you’d like to be apparent to.

By using your paid media creatives to promote your latest earned media wins, you will give your earned media the reach that it’s missing. Try using tweets for the copy and landing page of your Adwords ads, or having your display ads promote your big coverage pieces or favorite testimonials.

Examples from the wild:

Salesforce has committed an ad bombardment around its 2011 Dreamforce event, serving dozens of ads to promote it. This display ad particularly stood out, as it promotes its winning of the 2010 CRM Market Awards to display its legitimacy to those looking for new CRM solutions.

Evidon uses some of its big client wins to promote their service. Using logos of Akamai, The Media Kitchen, Mopar, and other brands as social proof, Evidon is effectively showing off their credibility and peaking its audience’s interest.

3. Use Paid Media To Generate Earned Media

Your brand’s starting to grow and you’re acquiring some great customers and partners, and you’re looking to keep this going. If your current customers truly are happy, they wouldn’t have any qualms with referring you to people within their own network who can benefit from your services. The only problem is that asking for referrals can be tough. You want to make it easy for your customers, and you don’t want to come off as needy or sound like you’re begging for business.

Paid media can be used as an awesome and automated approach to help you generate some earned media and referral business. To do this the right way, your ad creatives and landing pages need to be positioned appropriately. Have the messaging of your ads promote your brand’s values and use a call to action that promotes sharing. As for the landing pages, you can have your ads direct your audience to your social network of choice, with a pre-populated message that will help your audience spread your message to their own networks.

Here’s a great example of this from TheGiveGive’s Jeff Riddle:

Clicking on this ad will take users here, which pre-populates your tweet box with this message: “”Giving is good business” www.thegivegive.com via @thegivegive”.

This can be applied on Linkedin and Facebook as well! Click the following links to check it out:

• Linkedin Example
• Facebook Example

4. Retargeting Visitors Who Have Visited Important Webpages

If display and SEM are the bread and butter to your paid media initiatives, retargeting should be the meat of it. What you may already know is that retargeting shows ads to everyone who has visited your website but has left without converting. It is generally a much more cost effective way to drive conversions, since you’re only spending your advertising dollars toward people who have already shown interest in your brand, and you’re not spending any money toward developing an initial brand interest.

To retarget effectively, it’s a best practice to show roughly 15 to 20 impressions to each of your unique visitors who haven’t converted. However, sites with a small budget and a large amount of traffic may have a hard time allocating spend for retargeting. Naturally, an advertiser would attempt to combat this by starting with a smaller spend, but doing this will deliver sub-par results since the audience is being served less than 15 ads each month.

To fix this problem, start by retargeting visitors who have visited just one of your more important pages within your site (such as your pricing page), as opposed to your entire site. By doing so, you won’t waste any money on retargeting a sub-optimal amount of impressions to all of your website’s visitors. Instead, you’ll be focusing an optimal amount of impressions to a smaller, but more active and conversion ready audience. This effectively lowers your spend and increases your performance.

5. Drive Activation

The whole point of advertising is to spread your message. Companies generally spend money on ads with the hopes of achieving or optimizing toward an ROI. This general use case involves using ads to drive relevant traffic back to their website. But this use case doesn’t use paid media’s guaranteed timing and volume to its full potential.

Contests are amazing ways to drive brand activation and recognition. The problem with online campaigns, however, is that they tend to require people to visit a brand’s own internet real estate to partake in them. Using paid media, brands can activate a larger volume of people from real estate that the brand doesn’t have to own.

The campaign (look at the ad in the bottom right corner):

Target ads to a relevant audience or retarget ads to your current audience, with messaging based around finding a secret ad to win something.

Pick a time to serve your secret ads, and gather your winners! Anyone who clicks on the winning ad should be sent to a landing page to claim their booty. Terminate the campaign once it’s gathered a set number of winners. (Thanks to Chester French for the idea)

This not only drives your brand’s recognition and activation, but it develops stronger relationships and loyalty with your brand’s audience base. Ultimately, you’ll receive all of the benefits of running a contest just from serving some ads.

Conclusion

While paid media can become a very costly marketing channel, its guaranteed timing and volume gives marketers a lot of hidden value to work with. From quick tweaks to unique ideas, paid media campaigns can be modified to start delivering more marketing value in many ways, while keeping its costs within current budgets.

Have you tried any of these tactics? Do you have any cool tips and ideas to add? Be sure to share your findings below, and don’t hesitate to reach out to me and let me know how I can be helpful to you.

About the Author: Samir Soriano is the Director of Marketing at ReTargeter, and enjoys helping, learning, and doing.

Data courtesy of efrontier.com and magnaglobal.com.

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Facts and Stats to Tweet:

• Worldwide, paid search is a $34 billion industry. »tweet«
• By 2016, paid search is expected to grow by 75% to become a $61.1 billion industry. »tweet«
• Since 2006, the amount spent on paid search has increased by 250%. »tweet«
• Google Adwords has a declining return on investment (ROI), down 12% as of 1/2011. »tweet«
• Bing & Yahoo Advertising has an increasing return on investment (ROI), up 10% as of 1/2011. »tweet«
• Paid search is currently bigger than radio, outdoor and cinema advertising. »tweet«
• The average cost per click is up 11% (year over year) for Google, and 4% for Bing. »tweet«

1. Use the search data (i.e. keywords) from your website analytics.
2. Feed those keywords into your AdWords copy.
3. Watch what customers click on.
4. Iterate.

It’s a powerful cycle that will incrementally boost your clickthrough rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR). However, even some of the best search engine marketers will hit a plateau in their Pay-Per-Click campaigns using this technique.

The problem is that AdWords clicks only tell half the story. Keywords typed into Google don’t reveal what the customer is thinking.

The distinction between what the customer is thinking in their head and what they type has typically been lost to most website owners.

Until KISSinsights.

Learn What Customers Are Thinking, Not Typing

KISSinsights surveys catch your searchers “in the moment”, when their intent is strong and they are eager to get information.

Ask them the right question, and they’ll tell you those unspoken thoughts that never made it into the Google search box.

Now all you need to do is echo these insights back to the customer – using the same words they used – in your AdWords campaigns. Now you’re speaking (and thinking) the same language as your searchers!

Done right, this gives your ads the edge over your competitors. More searchers will click on your ads, and more of them will make it to your site and convert.

More clicks leads to higher keyword Quality Scores, which leads to higher Ad Rank and lower Cost Per Click. Now you’re paying less, outranking your competitors in search results, and attracting more qualified visitors to your site.

KISSinsights + Adwords Case Study

For the past few months, I’ve been optimizing an AdWords account for an Australian client.

I started out with one specific, highly competitive, keywords and ad combination. By using keyword search data from our analytics, I was able to iterate on that campaign until it reached a 6-7% CTR and $9 cost-per-conversion.

Then it plateaued. I’d reached the point where iterating based on data was not going to lead to further increases.

Enter KISSinsights.

I then installed KISSinsights on the landing page for the ad, set to popup after 30 seconds.

(The 30-second delay is designed to weed out unqualified visitors. If a visitor has stayed on a landing page for 30 seconds, they’ve demonstrated interest in your product/service.)

At this point, the searcher is a potential customer. Now they’re in research mode, asking themselves: “Does this particular product meet my very specific needs?”)

Now, how do I extract these very specific needs from the minds of your potential customers?

The 3 Questions You Need To Ask In KISSinsights

As can be seen in the screenshot above, there are 3 very specific questions* I use with KISSinsights:

• What is your single biggest, challenge, frustration or problem in researching (your product/service) online
• How difficult has it been to find the answer to your question?
• What made you search for this today?

Each of these 3 questions has been crafted for a specific reason that helps me to understand (respectively):

• What is the potential customer’s specific and unspoken need?
• How desperate is the searcher? If the answer is impossible to find, you almost certainly want to highlight this insight in your advertising. This may even become a Unique Selling Proposition for your business. If the answer is easy to find, still address it, though it may not make a significant change in your ad performance.
• Is there a context, trend or urgency for *today’s* search? Understanding this may give you further insights on where or how else you may be able to advertise (e.g. Insights gained here might give perfect keywords/categories for Display Network advertising).

Insights Revealed

It seems obvious now, but KISSinsights revealed something that I had completely missed.

Searchers were not only looking for specific product features. They were looking for Australian manufacturers with local delivery and customer service!

It was easy to overlook, because seemingly this had nothing to do with the product itself. But once I saw the data, it made sense: of course, shipping, delivery, and customer service are an important part of the whole product and customer experience.

Results

Armed with this new information, I tested a number of new ad variations.

In each variation, I only changed one element of the ad from the existing control ad: headline, 1st line, 2nd line, or display URL.

• The first ad (with the orange Paused status) is the control ad.
• First ad CTR: 6.59%
• First ad Cost Per Conversion: $9.20

The best ad variation that emerged from my experimentation was the 2nd ad. I have now made that the new control ad.

• Second ad CTR: 7.85%
• Second ad Cost Per Conversion: $5.77

The second ad reduced the advertising cost by more than 33%!

In addition, the higher CTR was rewarded by Google with a higher ‘Avg. Position’, 1.8, even though we are paying a lower ‘Avg. CPC’, $2.00.

I then incorporated this new 2nd line copy into other ad groups and campaigns for this client with similar results.

Using KISSinsights with AdWords can lead to hugely valuable customer insights for your business.

Next Steps

Now you’ve identified the specific customer need. You’ve incorporated it into your ad. Now you need to be reiterating that need in your landing page.

Landing page optimization is the last step between you and a higher conversion rate. By echoing the customers’ needs back to them at every step of the process, you’re able to capture more leads, hold their attention, and turn them into customers.

About the Author: Adam Sugihto is a Google Adwords Advanced Search Qualified Individual and is passionate about applying timeless copywriting, testing and consumer psychology principles to digital marketing. Adam’s heroes include David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins and Lester Wunderman. Adam is founder of Intention.al – a Google Adwords Certified Partner based in Melbourne, Australia. You can follow Adam on Twitter: @adamsugihto

*Foot Note: The Adwords + Landing Page Survey Technique, and the 3 specific questions are all adapted and used with permission from Marketing Psychologist and Researcher, Dr. Glenn Livingston, Ph.D. as part of his excellent Hyper Responsive Marketing program.

I have. It started when I clicked on an ad for a fitness product. I read through their sales page, considered the offer, and honestly, I was tempted to buy – but I decided not to.

It didn’t end there.

I started to notice this company’s ads everywhere – on Google searches, on image ads while reading completely unrelated sites, and even on YouTube videos.

One day, I was thinking about getting back into shape, and I bumped into the same ad again. I clicked through, and bought the product.

Clearly, stalking me worked for this company – so let’s talk about how you can do the same!

The Majority Don’t Convert: Understanding Re-Marketing

The significant majority of the people who visit your site do NOT convert.

They don’t sign up to your list, they don’t share your content, and they certainly don’t buy anything.

This may sound depressing, but it’s true; show me a marketer who says that his offer converts more than 50% of the time, and I’ll show you a marketer who’s inflating his numbers!

There’s nothing wrong with that, either – while conversion rates vary across industries and offers, in most cases involving online advertising, a conversion rate of 10% is considered exceptionally good.

But what about the other 90%?

Most marketers just let those prospects disappear. Which is a shame, because at least some of them would likely buy your stuff if you have another chance to make your case – especially if yours is the kind of offer that requires a little more research, planning and buyer education.

Re-marketing is about doing exactly that – presenting your ad and sales message to people who have already seen it, in hopes that the repeated exposure will convert more prospects into customers. You can use re-marketing to…

• Remind visitors about your free trial offer
• Showcase benefits that they may have missed on first glance
• Increase the size of a discount offer for those who weren’t converted by the base offer
• Show ads that adjust to reflect changing offer timelines (“only X days left”)

Re-marketing is an opportunity to try again with a prospect that expressed interest, but didn’t get so far as to take the desired action on the first exposure to your message.

Sounds great, right?

Except… if they don’t keep searching for you, how can you keep showing them your ad?

Where to Stalk Your Customers: The Google Display Network

The Google Display Network (GDN), formerly known as the Content Network, makes Google the perfect advertising partner. Through the GDN, you can place ads on many, many sites (including YouTube) – enough sites to reach 80% of global internet users.

Now usually, if you’re running ads on the GDN, Google’s algorithms find the pages on the content network that most closely match your keywords, and put your ads on those pages. But it doesn’t work that way with re-marketing – your ads can be displayed out of context. The prospect has already “raised their hand” and shown an interest in what you’ve got – they did that by visiting your site.

This means that you don’t need to resort to analyzing the pages that they read in order to find them as a prospect – you already know that they are, and you can stalk them with confidence, knowing that wherever they are, they’re still people who have an interest in what you are trying to sell.

Okay, let’s get to the nuts and bolts of how to do it…

Quick Start: Re-Marketing Setup in AdWords

The way to setup a re-marketing campaign is to click on the “Control panel and library” link that is under the list of campaign folders, on the left-hand side of the “Campaigns” tab in AdWords. From there, click on the Audiences option (still on the left), and create a new audience.

The actual setup is very simple; you pick a name and description for the list, and set the membership duration (how long should Google recognize someone as being on this list from the time they’ve visited your page). The default length is 30 days, but you can make it as short as a day, or as long as 18 months – it’s a question of how much time and consideration usually goes into your prospect’s decision-making process, and when do you want to be in front of them during that process.

Finally, you can either create a new tag (Google will give you a piece of code to insert into the pages for that tag), or associate the remarketing list with one of your pre-defined conversion goals.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Don’t Forget Image Ads

Image ads are the part of a display network campaign that often gets put on the list of “things to add later on”.

Don’t make that mistake with your re-marketing campaigns, though – yes, they do take a little more time and effort to create, but they’re important to your re-marketing efforts for two reasons:

1. A large proportion of the GDN is setup to favor image ads, and you will miss out on a lot of potential exposure if you don’t have them.
2. Human beings recognize images much more readily than they recognize text. Since re-marketing depends heavily on the prospect recognizing your branding and remembering the benefits that they read about, images are critically important.

In creating your image ads, try to keep the look as consistent as possible with the web pages that the prospect will have visited – the more quickly they recognize the ad, the more likely they are to click on it and convert.

Who to Stalk, and How to Do It: Targeting Lists

The beauty of re-marketing lists in AdWords is that you can use them to segment your customers based on the pages that they’ve visited on your site, and the actions that they’ve taken. The trick is to figure out what those page-views and actions can tell you about them, for example:

• If they’ve visited a specific product page, they could be researching different products in that category. Show them ads that showcase the benefits of your product versus the competing solutions that they might be evaluating.
• If they’ve visited your pricing page, they could be price shoppers who need to see more cost-justification information. Show them ads that include ROI calculations, examples of benefits, and your money-back guarantee.
• If they’ve visited your community page, then they’re probably interested in user engagement, so show them testimonials from satisfied users, and statistics showing how many tweets, shares, and so forth your content is generating.
• If they’ve visited your tools and resources page, they could be looking for stuff to add to their toolbox, and could be “collectors”, so consider showcasing a free download offer to attract them back into your funnel.
• If they’ve visited your email subscription thank you page, then you can show them targeted ads referencing the material that you’re sending them via email, to make your messaging even more effective and pervasive.
• If they’ve visited your shopping cart (but abandoned the process), then they’re the most valuable group of people you can target, because they were within one click of becoming your customers. Showcase the benefits of becoming a customer, including social proof from existing customers.

You show different ads to each of these groups by creating a different ad group for each of the tag categories. Start by creating tags for your highest traffic pages, and create at least two ads per ad group, so that you can start testing the different messaging options that you think might work.

Then gradually, as you track the results, expand by adding more tags to other key pages, and setting up ad groups to match.

The Right Messages for the Right People: Exclude Lists

If someone has visited and abandoned your checkout process, you don’t want to be showing them the same generic ad that you show anyone who has visited your site. The problem is that they will almost certainly have visited other pages on their way to the checkout process – which means that they’re likely to be on more than one list!

Ideally, you could configure the lists so that when someone is added to one list, they’re removed from another (this is pretty standard with auto-responders, for example). Alas, Google doesn’t allow us to do that at the moment, so we are left with two alternatives:

Alternative #1 is to create negative lists for each ad group. Just as you can select an audience for each ad group (defined by one of the targeting lists that you created), you can also select negative audiences – those targeting lists that should not be shown the contents of the ad group.

Important note: Create a list for people who have landed on your checkout thank you page (people who have successfully converted), and make sure to set that list as a negative audience for all of your ad groups – showing the ad to people who have already converted can cost you money and annoy your customers, without any up-side!

Alternative #2 is to bid higher on the ad groups targeting lists that are more likely to convert. Since you want prospects to see whatever ad is most likely to get them to convert, and you should be willing to pay more for impressions that are more likely to convert, you can adjust the bids so as to offer more for the ad groups that are targeting lists that are more likely to convert.

Why You Should Start Re-Marketing Today

Re-marketing allows you to target the people who have demonstrated an interest in what you’re selling, so that you can give them the extra nudge that they need in order to convert.

This will always be a best-practice, because it’s just smart marketing.

There is one very good reason why re-marketing will work better for you now than it ever will again, and that reason is that very few marketers are doing it. It will always be effective to re-market to your prospects, but it is even more effective now, when hardly anyone is doing it – you will be that much more memorable to your customers.

It takes less than an hour to setup an entire re-marketing campaign. So block off that hour in your calendar, and make it happen.

Your bottom line will thank you.

About The Author: Danny Iny is an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, and proud co-founder of Firepole Marketing, the definitive marketing training program for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and non-marketers. Visit his site today for a free cheat sheet about Why Guru Strategies for Blog Growth DON’T WORK… and What Does!, or follow him on Twitter @DannyIny.

In keeping with Tony Montana’s inspirational mantra, this final installment will discuss a few key strategies to continually acquire customers. To paraphrase Mr. Montana…

“In this online marketing space, you gotta spend the money first. Then when you get your learnings, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the CUSTOMERS.”

A Brief Recap

In Part 1 we:

1. Looked at effective keyword / ad copy / landing page relationships
2. Picked through the good, bad and the ugly ad copy experiences
3. Talked about the typical consumer clicking behavior

In Part 2 we:

1. Analyzed the importance of click-through-rate (CTR)
2. Learned that impression share (IS) is where you may be losing market share

Step 3: Customer Acquisition

At this juncture, are you able to see the forest through the trees? We’ve covered a lot of material in the first two steps (CTR, Quality Score, Impression Share, Ad copy, Landing Page relevancy, etc.) and it is important that you see the end goal through it all:

Success = Customer Acquisition

We’re going to take a slightly different approach with this final segment by stepping through a list of things not to do if you want to succeed in PPC marketing as a means of customer acquisition.

The ABC’s of failing at successful customer acquisition:

1. Assuming you know it all
2. Blocking and tackling only gets you so far
3. Calling it quits

A. Assuming You Know It All

Assumption is an enemy of PPC marketing and is a sin committed by even the most experienced marketers. An astute PPC marketer may unexpectedly find him/herself surrounded by stagnant keywords lists, dated ad copy and uninspiring landing pages and without a clue as to how he or she got there.

Where did we go wrong?

• Optimized keywords and match types…✓ CHECK
• Optimized ad groups and ad copy…✓ CHECK
• Optimized landing pages…✓ CHECK
• Optimized budgets and let the campaign run…✓ CHECK
• Sit back and watch the money pour into your bank account…X WRONG

The PPC marketplace is a living, breathing ecosystem that demands constant (and I mean constant) attention. There is no “set it and forget it” strategy in PPC. In a 2008 blog post, Google claimed that “20% of the queries receives each day are ones we haven’t seen in at least 90 days, if at all”! According to ComScore’s May 2011 Search Engine rankings report, more than 19 BILLION searches were performed across the top five search engines in the month of May. If the 20% “new search” rule holds true, that’s roughly 86,000 searches per minute that are new to search engines and search marketers!

Relevance is a moving target and you need to make sure your customers find it in your campaigns. Always, always be checking (another ABC acronym to remember!)

1. Check “see search terms” to see which terms triggered your ads. Using this tool provides a high probability of discovering new keywords to add to your existing campaigns.

2. Check your ads (and your competitor’s ads). Do you know about Google’s latest changes like longer headlines and adding Sitelinks?

Longer Headlines

The advantage of “longer headlines” is to (Google said it best) “display more information where it’s most likely to be noticed–in the headline”.

Ads 1 and 3 in the real-life example above are NOT taking advantage of longer headlines.

Sitelinks

Per Google, advertisers have seen upwards of a 30% lift in CTR through the use of Sitelinks.

1-800-Flowers’ use of sitelinks takes up twice the real-estate as the FTD ad.

3. Have a discerning eye: learn from every landing page you visit. This applies to your casual surfing, online shopping, research and competitive analysis. After you’ve clicked on a paid ad, take a few extra seconds to observe the landing page and try to pick it apart. What works well on the landing page? What doesn’t? Take these observations and try to apply it to your site. It just might give you an edge over your competitors!

The bottom line is, between a steady influx of beta tests from Google/Bing and innovations of PPC ads and landing pages from other Search Marketers, you simply don’t and can’t know everything. Never assume you’ve figured it out. You will get left behind.

B. Blocking And Tackling Only Gets You So Far

This section can be summed up in two words: GO BIG. “Blocking and Tackling” is a phrase that emphasizes the need to excel at fundamentals. We covered many PPC marketing fundamentals in the first two segments and it is important to note that you should always strive to block and tackle your way to success. However, don’t let the routine of blocking and tackling impede your creative and innovative side. Constantly remind yourself that end goal is customer acquisition (and your ongoing challenge) is to constantly build a better mouse trap.

Let us be clear that GOING BIG does not mean be reckless. It means think outside the box and take calculated risks. How? Collect data and create a test plan.

Collecting Data

Tim Ash, founder of SiteTuners and a world renown optimization expert, often asks the question “Who should be in charge of designing landing pages?”

C-level executives (CEO/COO/CTO/CMO)? Nope.

Engineers and Developers? Negative.

Marketers and designers? Keep going.

Creative Agencies? Not quite.

Who’s left? Your Customers!

Run an online survey, ask friends and family about what matters to them (as it relates to your online business) and try to think from your customer’s perspective. Don’t try to think for the customer. Be the customer.

Create a Test Plan (and Test!)

Be intentional and routine about allocating a small test budget and force yourself to test new ideas. If finding ideas to test is challenging, it simply means you need to do more research and ask more questions.

Once you have a list of items to test, find the simplest way to set up and run tests. Leverage free tools already available through Adwords like Campaign Experiments to perform A/B split tests or Google’s Web Optimizer as a means of running more complex multi-variate tests. Whatever your methodology, think of the simplest, cheapest way to test that requires minimal engineering resources.

My parting thought on this topic is this: tests results are useless if reporting and analytics are not reliable. Whether your reporting is homegrown, off the shelf or a bit of both, it must be reliable and trustworthy. If it isn’t, fix it.

C. Calling it Quits

Let’s not sugar coat it – PPC marketing can sometimes be frustrating and often unsuccessful. When should you call it quits?

This is not an easy question to address but I will answer it with additional questions:

How much have you spent to date?

If your answer is “a few hundred bucks”, you may not have given yourself a fair chance at success. Did your “few hundred bucks” yield enough clicks? Were you able to collect sufficient campaign data to make the right decision?

If you answered “a few thousand dollars” or “tens of thousands of dollars”, it might behoove you to have a PPC professional audit your campaigns before you spend more money. Having a professional help optimize your marketing spend may make the difference between bleeding money and turning a profit.

Are your direct competitors continuing to bid on the same keywords?

If you answered “no”, it may be an indicator that 1) you’ve stumbled onto a new and untapped market (somewhat unlikely), 2) competitors have optimized out of those keywords due to low conversions or 3) you’re simply targeting the wrong keywords.

If you answered “yes”, you will want to spend some time analyzing your competitor’s ads and landing pages to find the exactly how they’re able to afford to run their campaigns.

Have you sought professional help?

There is no shame in asking for help in PPC marketing (or online marketing in general). Most business owners wouldn’t write and produce their own radio or TV commercials or design their own print/billboard ads… so why assume that the failure of a self designed/managed online campaign was the medium and not the marketer?

If you’re ready to throw in the towel, please take time to answer these questions.

Conclusion: Get Your Customers

Get your customers, as in, go acquire customers. You already know how to Test, Learn, Refine and Repeat. Continually look for signals in your analytics and data for opportunities to optimize for volume and conversions.

At the same time, get your customers, as in, understand their mindset, comprehend their goals and be prepared to test new ideas that try to convince your potential customers to use your site over your competitors.

This concludes our three part introductory series on PPC marketing. We covered a lot of material, “best practices”, strategies and tips, yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. Relative to other marketing mediums, pay-per-click marketing is still in its infancy with a very long, promising future. As you establish your own history with online marketing and expand your knowledgebase, remind yourself to be like Tony Montana (only the positive, inspirational qualities… ignore the rest). Be hungry, scrappy, and aggressive and work harder and smarter than your competitors. As Tony said “The World is Yours!”

About The Author: Jacob Shin is the Director of Online Marketing & Customer Acquisition at Savings.com where he focuses on high volume paid search strategy and conversion optimization for US and UK based traffic. Connect with Jacob.

On to Step 2: Then you get the power

Be empowered by the data acquired in Step 1 and scale your online marketing strategy. In Part 2, we will delve into testing concepts from Part 1 to further develop and expand your PPC strategy.

Our friend, Tony Montana, didn’t start out as a powerful man, but leveraged his resourceful and scrappy ways to elevate himself to a position of power. Tony’s knowledge of his product, customers and competitors helped him stay in power.

This section will be the most helpful after you’ve spent some time and money on a PPC test buy and will assume you have data readily available for analysis.

We will start at the top of the conversion funnel and work our way down: Impressions -> Clicks -> Conversion

I hope you are ready to roll up your sleeves and spend a little time analyzing results from your PPC test, specifically looking at KPI’s (key performance indicator) from your campaign.

Tip #1: Try to avoid “Analysis Paralysis” by over analyzing every single metric. Create a story that can be explained using your KPIs instead.

A. Impressions vs. Impression Share (IS):

Impression: when an ad is shown to a user.

Basic question: How many impressions did my campaign generate?

Looking at the count of Impressions will provide you the total number of instances where keywords triggered ads to be shown on a search engine results page (SERP). When a search is performed in Google for the phrase “Hawaiian vacation with kids”, the following advertisers (1-3) each increased their impression count by one (+1) because of the search.

While the gross number of impressions your campaign receives may seem important, it is much more useful when you have additional data points that provide context.

Impression Share: the percentage of times your ads were shown (i.e. your total impressions) out of the total number of page impressions (i.e. pages where your ad appeared or could have appeared) in the market you were targeting.

Advanced question: Did my campaign get enough impressions?

This question looks beyond the raw number of impressions and addresses the more important goal of making each impression matter.

• Were your ads shown in a position that met your expectations?
• Most importantly, did your ads serve when you expected them to and how does this compare to your competitors?

Generally speaking, “ad position” is influenced by the amount you are willing to pay (max CPC bid) and the relevancy of the ad to the keywords in your ad group (Quality Score). Quality Score is a numeric representation of the relevancy of your ads and keywords assigned independently by both Google and Bing. It is important to note that only Google’s Quality Score impacts ad position currently. Bing’s Quality Score serves only as a guideline to improve your ad/keyword relevancy. We will discuss Quality Score in further detail in Part B.

To answer the second question, turn your attention to the Impression Share (IS) metric in the Adwords interface.

Tip #2: Impression Share stats can only be generated at the Campaign level (in Adwords) and is not available yet in AdCenter (as of May 8, 2011). Keep this in mind as you structure your Campaigns and Ad Groups. Impression Share metrics will be less useful in Campaigns consisting of Ad Groups with little to no relevance to one another.

Tip #3: To enable Impression Share metrics in your Adwords interface, 1) Select a Campaign, 2) Click on the Dimensions tab, and 3) Check all boxes.

In plain English, the above can be translated as:

1. Impression Share: My ads showed up 84.41% of the time they were qualified to show on Google
2. Exact match IS: If all of my keywords were set to “Exact Match”, my ads would have shown up 9 out of 10 searches (89.95%) for keywords in my campaign
3. Lost IS (budget): My ads did not stop serving during this time due to my budget maxing out
4. Lost IS (rank): Ad Rank = CPC bid x Quality Score. My ads did not serve 15.59% of the time because either my CPC bids or Quality Scores were low

As illustrated in the example above:

Impression share + Lost IS (budget) + Lost IS (rank) should always = 100%.

If you want to reach your potential customers at all times, your goal should be to have an Impression Share number close to 100% and the two “Lost IS” numbers close to 0%.

If your Impression Share is far from 100%, here are some tips to help you recover your “lost” impressions:

• Lost IS (rank), aka “CPC bids too low” – Look at the average position of each keyword. Is it above minimum bid (AdCenter calls it minimum bid, Adwords calls it “first page bid”)? With bids below these thresholds, your ads will not show up on search results pages.
• Lost IS (rank), aka “Quality Score too low” – Are your Keyword Quality Scores (QS) below 5/10? Per Google, since “Ad Rank” is a calculation of your Bid and QS, it would behoove you to improve Quality Scores by focusing on increasing CTRs in your Ads and Keywords. Improve CTRs by tightening up Ad Groups that only consist of closely related keywords and Ads that are the most relevant to these keywords.
• Lost IS (budget), aka “budget too low” – Do your campaigns have set daily/monthly budget caps? If so, are your campaigns hitting their caps frequently? Budget caps help pace PPC spend but can also suppress yours Ads from being shown if set too low. Google calls it “throttling” where Adwords won’t serve up ads every time they are eligible to be shown in an effort to allow your account to evenly pace through the daily budget.

How does this Impression data help empower you?

Now you know the difference between impressions and Impression Share (IS). Regularly monitor your Impression Share metrics and quickly fix issues as they arise. Low Impression Share hurts your chances at success by allowing your competitors to gain greater market share. Chances are, your competitors are already closely monitoring their IS and actively optimizing to 100% Impression Share. PPC is a dynamic platform – always look for opportunities to make gains over your competitors.

B. Clicks: CTR and QS (Quality Score)

Clickthrough Rate: number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of impressions.

Basic Question: What is my average Click-Through Rate (CTR)?

At a high level, Clickthrough Rate gauges how convincing your ad is to your target audience. Many marketers often focus only on writing convincing ads. An equally important aspect to CTR is to target the ads to the right audience.

Steps to build a PPC campaign include:

1. Creating Ad Groups
2. Selecting and grouping keywords into Ad Groups
3. Creating Ads for Ad Groups.

As discussed in Part 1 of this series, every Ad Group should consist of closely related keywords and a minimum of two ad variations. And as suggested in Tip #2 , every campaign should be comprised of closely themed Ad Groups.

This all seems pretty elementary… what’s my point?

Tight keyword groups (target your audience) + relevant ads (be convincing) = higher CTR

Don’t just build – build your campaigns and ad groups intelligently.

Take a look at the following sample Ad Group:

Given that the “theme” of this Ad Group is “Hawaii Vacation”, the keywords in this Ad Group seem pretty relevant to each other and the two Ad variations also appear to be pertinent to the keywords. Is this a targeted Ad Group?

Now look at Example #2:

If you are searching for the term “flights to Hawaii”, which Keyword-Ad combination is most likely to win your click? If you chose Ad Group 2, you are correct for the following reasons:

Assuming keyword bids are all equal, why is Ad Group 2 most likely to outperform Ad Group 1?

• Tight keyword groups – all keywords in Ad Group 2 pertain specifically to airfare
• Relevant Ads – both versions of the Ad pertain to airfare
• Display URL is more relevant to airfare
• Higher CTR will result in higher Quality Score, which, in turn, improves Ad Rank and lowers CPCs, which enables you to bid to a higher position**. Come again?

**Note: the following is a simplification of the relationship between CTR and Google’s Quality Score and should only be used as a high-level reference. Please refer to Google’s Quality Score documentation for additional detail.

Advanced Question: Why does CTR matter?

We discussed earlier that Clickthrough Rate is a measure of how convincing your ad is to your target audience. Google calls this “relevancy” and assigns a numeric value called the “Quality Score”

Per Google, Quality Score is made up of the following the core components:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network — not on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

It is no accident that CTR is mentioned in three of the seven core components listed above.

CTR matters because it is a metric that can be controlled by marketers. However, while Google’s emphasis on CTR should be noted, it is also important that marketers don’t get tunnel vision with improving CTR. It is not an uncommon mistake for marketers to focus primarily on improving CTR… to their detriment. Creating highly attractive ads for the sole purpose of increasing CTR could be a costly error that ultimately impact your account history, especially if the ads are misleading and result in high bounce rates.

Note: Bing recently introduced their version of Quality Score. As stated on Bing’s site, Quality Score “is not used to calculate ad position directly” but indicates the degree to which ads are “eligible” to be served. At this time, it appears that only ad with a “Poor” Quality Score may have problems serving. Ads with “Good” and “No Problem” scores are eligible to serve.

The main takeaway is to define your audience with you selection of keywords and show ads that are relevant and compelling to that audience.

Conclusion: Get the Power, Use the Power

To some marketers, Impressions and Clicks are just simple one-dimensional metrics. You are not that marketer. Like Tony Montana, you know how to target your customers and are cognizant of your performance vs. competitors (Impressions Share),

At this point, you should be familiar with the following PPC tactics:

• Selecting and targeting your audience with tight keyword clusters
• Structuring tight campaign ad groups
• Building solid ads that are highly relevant and compelling
• Analyzing impressions and impression share
• Optimizing Ad Groups for high CTR, Quality Score and Ad Rank

I challenge you to apply these learnings to your campaigns and try to find the setup best suited for your conversion goals.

1. Test – Test your campaign & ad group structures; test your ad copy variations
2. Learn – Familiarize yourself with Impression Share, Quality Score and Ad Rank; use these metrics as a feedback mechanism to improve your key metrics
3. Optimize/Refine – Modify what doesn’t work, test new ideas; repeat steps 1 through 3

Stay tune for the final part of this series that will dive deep into conversions, conversion metrics and optimization tips.

About The Author: Jacob Shin is the Director of Online Marketing & Customer Acquisition at Savings.com where he focuses on high volume paid search strategy and conversion optimization for US and UK based traffic. Connect with Jacob.